about.

STUDIO STEFANIA MISCETTI is proud to present perlepie, the sixth solo exhibition of work by Gian Domenico Sozzi at the gallery.

The pieces on show – all produced this year, and many on display for the first time – constitute a series of silk-screen prints on mirrors, which the artist has created using old paintings that have fallen into decay.

Sozzi’s practice is characterised by intimate and personal memory; by the rediscovery and re-evaluation of fragments of the everyday; and in his hands their existence, ignored or forgotten, ultimately acquires new meaning.

The artist’s relationship with the Studio Miscetti has deep roots that date back to the 1990s. As early as 1992, Sozzi presented a series of original photographs and sculptures, which formed the basis of tête à tête. In 1996, the artist–actor was both architect and subject of a multiform portrait in cielospettacolo, whose play of black-and-white images brought together a collage of environmental proportions. Meanwhile, for anatra muta (2000) and so it goes (2008), he breathed new life into found objects which he stored, kept safe, and then unveiled. Finally, in 2009 he played a central role in a special edition of the annual SHE DEVIL exhibition with his video piece Brava (2006).

perlepie came out of a chance intuition on the unexpressed potential of long-forgotten canvasses. Following this epiphany/revelation, Sozzi decided to seek out these pictures in the store rooms of museums; before pushing them to interact with the mirror’s mutable, reflective nature through the use of silk-screen printing.

With this approach, he imbues new light into the faces and details of time-worn and damaged paintings. The depth of the mirror and the black ink underline the paintings’ violated nature, emphasising the tears and folds in the canvas, as if to celebrate the material’s very frailty.

Some of the works from the perlepie series featured in a solo exhibition held at the artist-run CLER space in Milan last spring.

Milan, Friday 4 March 2022

The sun, most abundant up here in the tower, casts its shadows everywhere: between the bookshelves, on the sofas, on the walls and windowpanes – but also on that extremely frayed canvas over there. For years it has been sat, along with its saintly bodies, next to the worktable, waiting to be restored or perhaps rolled up to go into the attic – or worse still, left to expire in a cloud of dust, vanishing like a dandelion’s head. But one day the sun lit up a pair of little daisies at the base of that canvas – daisies which the Virgin nearly trampled all over – and it is from the reddish hues of those countryside gems that the pious were born. That’s how the search for works forgotten in museum stores began – forgotten because they were in pieces, torn, peeling, or had occasionally been stitched with new faces – but always left in darkness. And so, flirting with dust and its radical opacity, I decided to give them the chance of a future: dressing them up in a funeral cloak, forcing their images into the depths of a mirror until they became pictures in exile, shy walk-on parts, and in some cases epiphanies. First, it was the details: a flower, a hand, a cherub’s wing, a lamb’s hoof, the foot of a bearded saint, a young shepherd, or a flying face (perhaps taken from another canvas). Then I scraped together images that verged on nothing: a portrait of a woman on a broken panel whom they say is from Brina; a gentleman by Ridolfo or his workshop; a pope copied from Capodimonte; a young man in a striped doublet scratched by Boltraffio’s cat; and that broodingly handsome figure with the luscious lips, for whom they say there is no index card, only a number – though not an unlucky one at that: on the contrary, it keeps renewing itself, like the moon.”

Gian Domenico Sozzi

Read and download the exhibition’s press release.